Editorial: Shot in the dark: The federal vaccine distribution plan needs a lot of work
Election Day may have passed, but states are hurtling toward another big deadline on Nov. 15, when the Centers for Disease Control says they should be ready to receive the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine.
But in what feels like a repeat of March and April, when the Trump administration abandoned states to figure out their own response to the deadly coronavirus, federal health officials are once again giving states little funding and paltry guidance on how to run the largest mass vaccination program in American history.
For one, the feds are requiring states be ready to receive a vaccine, despite the fact one hasn’t yet been approved from among multiple candidates in development, each of them with different requirements for storage and distribution.
States with limited cold storage capacity haven’t been informed how much vaccine they’ll get initially, complicating efforts to assess whether their capacity will be sufficient in the immediate future.
While the federal government and manufacturers are covering costs of buying and shipping the vaccine, states left cash-strapped by the pandemic are on the hook to figure out how to keep those millions of doses in good condition, and to set up public information campaigns to tell residents how, when and where to get vaccinated.
The Trump administration shelled out just $200 million so far to help states create vaccine distribution plans, despite CDC Director Robert Redfield’s own estimate it will cost at least $6 billion. And federal officials aren’t funding efforts to train people to administer the vaccine, making an extremely optimistic assumption that America’s existing hospital and pharmacy workforce will be able to dispense millions of vaccine doses next year.
As vaccine enthusiast Benjamin Franklin once said, if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.
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